Community Corner

One Day To Live Becomes Over 50 Years

Annette Richardson-Bienkowski, who has survived almost 54 years with diabetes, participates in "Step Out" walk on Sunday

Among the participants who will take part in the Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes on Sunday is a woman whose doctors thought upon her initial diagnosis, at age 18, that she would not live to see her 20s. Annette Richardson-Bienkowski has been participating in the three-mile walk on the boardwalk without fail in recent years. She is 72 years old.

Annette was born in Deal, England, shortly after the start of World War II and recalled a regular routine of seeking shelter during air raids in her childhood. Before she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, she was “sleeping all the time and eating like a truck driver,” but still losing weight. One day, her mother found her on the stairs, too weak to climb them. After a trip to the doctor and a series of blood tests, she was found to have extremely high blood sugar.

“They told my mother they’d come to pick me up and that I had one day to live,” she said. “They obviously were wrong.”

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After spending two months in a pair of hospitals, Annette’s life expectancy was raised, but only to 15 to 20 years. She was put on insulin after practicing the injection on an orange. She decided to see the world, with the initial hope of visiting Australia. However, she was encouraged by a nurse to go to the United States instead. The nurse, who was also emigrating, said the U.S. would be closer to England in the event that she needed to return to see a doctor.

So it was that Annette came to upstate New York in November of 1960, just before her 21st birthday. Among her belongings were one bottle of insulin, one glass syringe, and a stainless steel needle she had to sharpen whenever it became blunt.

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“Every morning I had to boil the syringe and the needle before I used it,” she said. “And I used the same needle forever. It wasn’t like nowadays when the disposable needles came out.”

Annette soon moved to New Jersey, where she discovered an unexpected hardship in the expensive price of insulin in the drugstore.

“In England it was national health,” she said. “I was so stupid, I didn’t know in America there wasn’t national health.”

Annette managed to get a small supply of insulin at a hospital after slipping on the ice, and later got a job working at a department store in South Amboy. Her association with southeastern Connecticut came through a pen pal, whose brother she had met while he was in the Air Force. It was this man, John Richardson-Bienkowski, who picked her up at when she visited her pen pal in New London.

“I had him then; he was mine,” she said.

The couple lived with a friend and his wife for a time. When John proposed, they flew to England to be married. Annette said the decision was a major step in standing up to her condition, since it was expected that the dire effects such as amputated limbs, kidney failure, heart disease, nerve damage, and blindness would inhibit a normal life.

“My parents were told that I should never leave them because these things were going to happen. And that I should never ever get married because with this disease you should never get pregnant,” she said. “I keep thinking, ‘I showed them, didn’t I?’”

Annette had two healthy daughters, who have now given her four grandsons. She said one daughter is a teacher at , while one of her grandsons recently got a football scholarship to the University of New Haven.

The diagnosis for her lifespan caused Annette some concern, and after her marriage she hoped she would simply be able to live until age 40. At that age, she felt, the children would be teenagers and it would be easier for John to raise them. However, she says she never let the prediction cause her grief.

“I honestly didn’t even think about it or dwell on it,” she said. “I just lived each day.”

Nine years ago, Annette switched to an insulin pump which supplies her with the hormone as a body normally would. She said she is one of a small group of people to have survived diabetes for over 50 years, and was honored by the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard University when she hit that anniversary. She also volunteers for studies at the center, and was recently called back as one of 10 survivors with conditions researchers wanted to study further in their efforts to find a cure.

Annette, who now lives in Quaker Hill, says she always introduces John as her personal hero. There have been times in their relationship, she says, when her husband helped to prevent her from slipping into a coma.

“He saved my life I don’t know how many times” she said.

John responded with modesty.

“I don’t like to think of myself as a hero,” he said. “I think it’s something as a husband or a wife, you just do it.”

Annette says that while she considers juvenile diabetes a separate condition from the type of diabetes that afflicts those with unhealthy diets and sedentary lifestyles, she has been active in benefits to fight the disease. Her main focus has been on the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation walk in Niantic, which she has done for 12 years.

Registration for the Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes starts at 9 a.m. at . The walk begins at 10 a.m.


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